Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

What Is To Be Done?

BURNING QUESTIONS of our MOVEMENT

The history of Russian Social-Democracy can be distinctly
    divided into three periods:

The first period embraces about ten years, approximately from
    1884 to 1894. This was the period of the rise and consolidation of
    the theory and programme of Social-Democracy. The adherents of the
    new trend in Russia were very few in number. Social-Democracy
    existed without a working-class movement, and as a political party
    it was at the embryonic stage of development.

The second period embraces three or four years—1894-98, In
    this period Social-Democracy appeared on the scene as a social
    movement, as the upsurge of the masses of the people, as a
    political party. This is the period of its childhood and
    adolescence. The intelligentsia was fired with a vast and general
    zeal for struggle against Narodism and for going among the
    workers; the workers displayed a general enthusiasm for strike
    action. The movement made enormous strides. The majority of the
    leaders were young people who had not reached “the age of
    thirty-five” which to Mr. N. Mikhailovsky appeared to be a sort of
    natural border-line. Owing to their youth, they proved to be
    untrained for practical work and they left the scene with
    astonishing rapidity. But in the majority of cases the scope of
    their activity was very wide. Many of them had begun their
    revolutionary thinking as adherents of Narodnaya Volya. Nearly all
    had in their early youth enthusiastically worshipped the terrorist
    heroes. It required a struggle to abandon the captivating
    impressions of those heroic traditions, and the struggle was
    accompanied by the breaking off of personal relations with people
    who were determinedto remain loyal to the Narodnaya Volya and for
    whom the young Social-Democrats had profound respect. The struggle
    compelled the youthful leaders to educate themselves to read
    illegal literature of every trend, and to study closely the
    questions of legal Narodism. Trained in this struggle,
    Social-Democrats went into the working-class movement without “for
    a moment” forgetting either the theory of Marxism, which brightly
    illumined their path, or the task of overthrowing the
    autocracy. The formation of the Party in the spring of 1898 was
    the most striking and at the same time the last act of the
    Social-Democrats of this period.

The third period, as we have seen, was prepared in 1897 and it
    definitely cut off the second period in 1898 (1898-?). This was a
    period of disunity, dissolution, and vacillation. During
    adolescence a youth’s voice breaks. And so, in this period, the
    voice of Russian Social-Democracy began to break, to strike a
    false note — on the one hand, in the writings of Messrs. Struve
    and Prokopovich, of Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and on the other, in
    those of V. l-n and R. M., of B. Krichevsky and Martynov. But it
    was only the leaders who wandered about separately and drew back;
    the movement itself continued to grow, and it advanced with
    enormous strides. The proletarian struggle spread to new strata of
    the workers and extended to the whole of Russia, at the same time
    indirectly stimulating the revival of the democratic spirit among
    the students and among other sections of the population. The
    political consciousness of the leaders, however, capitulated
    before the breadth and power of the spontaneous upsurge; among the
    Social-Democrats, another type had become dominant — the type of
    functionaries, trained almost exclusively on “legal Marxist”
    literature, which proved to be all the more inadequate the more
    the spontaneity of the masses demanded political consciousness on
    the part of the leaders. The leaders not only lagged behind in
    regard to theory (“freedom of criticism”) and practice
    (“primitiveness”), but they sought to justify their backwardness
    by all manner of high-flown arguments. Social-Democracy was
    degraded to the level of trade-unionism by the Brentano adherents
    in legal literature, and by the tail-enders in illegal
    literature. TheCredoprogramme began to be put into
    operation, especiallywhen the “primitive methods” of the
    Social-Democrats caused a revival of revolutionary non-Social-Democratic 
	tendencies.

If the reader should feel critical that I have dealt at too
    great length with a certainRabocheye Dyelo,Ican say
	only thatRabocheye Dyeloacquired
    “historical” significance because it most notably reflected the
    “spirit” of this third period.[1]It was not the consistent R. M., but
    the weathercock Krichevskys and Martynovs who were able properly
    to express the disunity and vacillation, the readiness to make
    concessions to “criticism” to “Economism”, and to 
	terrorism. Not the lofty contempt for practical work displayed by some 
	worshipper of the “absolute” is characteristic of this period, 
	but the combination of pettifogging practice and utter disregard for
    theory. It was not so much in the direct rejection of “grandiose
    phrases” that the heroes of this period engaged as in their
    vulgarisation. Scientific socialism ceased to be an integral
    revolutionary theory and became a hodgepodge “freely” diluted with
    the content of every new German textbook that appeared; the slogan
    “class struggle” did not impel to broader and more energetic
    activity but served as a balm, since “the economic struggle is
    inseparably linked with the political struggle”; the idea of a
    party did not serve as a call for the creation of a militant
    organisation of revolutionaries, but was used to justify some sort
    of “revolutionary bureaucracy” and infantile playing at
    “democratic” forms.

When the third period will come to an end and the fourth (now
    heralded by many portents) will begin we do not know. We are
    passing from the sphere of history to the sphere of the present
    and, partly, of the future. But we firmly believe that the fourth
    period will lead to the consolidation of militant Marxism, that
    Russian Social-Democracy will emerge from the crisis in the full
    flower of manhood, that the opportunistrearguard will be “replaced” by the genuine vanguard of the most
	revolutionary class.

In the sense of calling for such a “replacement” and by way of
    summing up what has been expounded above, we may meet the
    question, What is to be done? with the brief reply:

Put an End to the Third Period.

[1]I could also reply with the German proverb:Den Sack schlägt man,
    den Esel meint man(you beat the sack, but you mean the
    donkey). NotRabocheye Dyeloalone, but alsothe
    broad mass ofpractical workersand theoreticianswas carried away by the “criticism”a la mode, becoming
    confused in regard to the question of spontaneity and lapsing
    from the Social-Democratic to the trade-unionist conception of
    our political and organisational tasks.
    —Lenin